It turns out that Hennepin County, MN, has some 3,000 persons on its registered voter rolls that are missing key identifying data, such as birthdates, names and addresses. Many of those incomplete records suggest a registered voter age of more than 100 years including many with birth years listed as 1900. According to Alpha News, though, that bogus birth year was just a placeholder, since Minnesota law did not require a birth date before 1983.

That’s just idiotic, though. It would have been simple enough to set the “placeholder” year to 1962, so those voters, for good or ill, could be adjudged old enough to vote, and then year by year to walk that placeholder year forward until 1983 and then freeze the placeholder to that year.

Even better, when that 1983 law required birth dates and the fields (month-day-year) created in the voter registration database, it would have been simple to fill in the birth date fields associated with the year 1900 with NA and then send requests to those voters for their birth dates—and then remove altogether those voters who did not respond within some reasonable period of time, say three months.

Whether 1900 was chosen out of laziness, incompetence, or an overt effort to masquerade the ineligible as eligible is anyone’s guess.